Skip to main content

Heart - Heart

Heart

After a string of somewhat lacklustre albums Heart reinvented themselves as mainstream rockers, got picked up by Capitol Records and dropped one of their biggest albums ever in 1985. The band employed outside writers on over half of the tracks, including the rejected Toronto track "What About Love" that became the band's first big hit in years, and after that the hits kept coming: "These Dreams" which would go all the way to number one, along with "Never" and "Nothin' at All", and "If Looks Could Kill" which was pretty cool.

I wonder how much of this was right place, right time ... whatever the case Heart was back, and the album would sell over 600,000 in Canada, and over 5,000,000 in the States. Not bad considering their previous two records hadn't gone gold, and the band seemed to be done.

insert

Heart is one of those bands I never really gave much thought to. When I was a kid I absolutely loved "Barracuda" and "Magic Man" and then I sort of fell off. I never bought any of their records ... although I did pick up Passionworks because I liked one song ... for the guitar solo. I can't remember the name of the song without looking. I've mentioned it before ... I tend to repeat myself after a while.

Listening to Heart now is kind of fun. I mean they were going for the mainstream, and boy howdy they weren't swimming against the current. The album was produced and engineered by Ron Nevison and the record absolutely shimmers.

more insert

The band was solid with Mark Andes on bass, Howard Leese on guitar, keys and mandolin, and Denny Carmassi on drums. In the smaller print synth whiz Peter Wolf played keys and was credited with "creative" input. From Heart to the Commodores, he was doing his thing.

I suppose to the hardcore fans who'd been along since '75 this new sound a decade later must have seemed like the band was selling out. Sell out they did as the '85 self-titled released outsold the band's first three classic albums combined.

Does that make this one better?

back cover

Absolutely not but it is pretty bloody good. It's funny as I'd just listened to Bad Animals a couple of months ago and for whatever reason (it may have been a lack of coffee) the album just didn't have any legs for me ... that day.

It's absolutely astounding to think this album is forty years old. Not everything has held up but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how many of the songs I recognized and how good they sounded to these old ears.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...
Post a Comment
Read more

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald,  who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...
Post a Comment
Read more